


Staying On the Earth

by FernWithy



Series: The Wedding Guitar [8]
Category: Coco (2017)
Genre: Family, Gen, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-22
Updated: 2019-02-22
Packaged: 2019-11-03 18:18:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,736
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17882831
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FernWithy/pseuds/FernWithy
Summary: After Imelda's death, Coco and Victoria visit a small village in the mountains





	Staying On the Earth

_January, 1971._  
Victoria started to reach for the radio, but of course, this was the shop truck, and there was no radio. She’d gotten used to driving Joaquin’s truck up here, and she would miss the truck more than she missed the man, and certainly more than she missed his incessant ranting about la revolución. They’d dated for three months, but it sometimes felt like three years.  
  
Still, she missed the truck, which had been full of blankets and the warm smell of dogs. He’d had a radio, and, once they’d gotten out of Santa Cecilia, they’d blasted music out the windows. He hadn’t been a great fan of the U.S. government, but he had loved rock music, and if there had been anything to that relationship, it had been that Victoria had been free to love it as well, at least when she wasn’t at home.  
  
It might have gone on indefinitely, probably with no conclusion in marriage, as that was apparently not part of Joaquin’s vision, but then Mamá Imelda had the stroke. As she lay dying in the old house, Joaquin had demanded that Victoria join him for a protest march in Jalisco. Victoria had refused. This had ended up in a screaming match (she’d dragged him out to an alley behind the plaza where it would be drowned out by the music) in which he had said that Mamá Imelda couldn’t die soon enough for his taste, that she was just a crazy old bitch who exploited her family and made everyone around her miserable.  
  
For the first and only time in her life, Victoria had gone for her chancla. It seemed appropriate. She’d chased him back to his truck and pushed him into it, pulling his keys out of her pocket and throwing them at him. She’d continued beating the truck with her shoe until he finally sped up too much for her to catch him, then she’d sat down on a crate and started crying. A curious little boy had poked his head into the alley, but no one else seemed to have noticed anything. She’d finished her cry, dried her eyes, then gone back to sit her shift in the death room, holding her grandmother’s hand and promising to make the most of her intelligence and ambition. Mamá Imelda had started to drift off to sleep, and Victoria was about to tiptoe off when a surprisingly strong hand had gripped her wrist. “You dropped that awful boy, didn’t you?”  
  
Her voice was slurred from the stroke and she spoke very slowly and deliberately, but she was completely understandable. Victoria sat down again. “I… yes, Mamá Imelda. We… had a falling out.”  
  
She nodded. “You wouldn’t have been happy, with him telling you what to do. You’re my good, stubborn girl. You need a _good_ man. A man who is kind. Who…” Her eyes filled with tears, and she didn’t finish the sentence. “Or no man,” she finally whispered. “A good man, or no man. Never settle for a bad one.”  
  
Victoria dared herself to say, “My grandfather…”  
  
Mamá Imelda’s jaw tightened, and Victoria assumed she wouldn’t say anything, or would just yell, like usual, but she didn’t. “He was a… a very silly man. An irresponsible man. He wasn’t…” She blinked her eyes rapidly. “I don’t want to talk about Héc… I don’t want to talk about him.”  
  
Victoria’s ears had perked up. _Héc_. Héctor, maybe. Probably. But no one said his name.   
  
She sat down again, and Mamá Imelda patted her wrist. She seemed so wasted, even though she was only seventy and her hair was still thick and black. The stroke had hit her out of nowhere. One day, she had been making shoes and sarcastic comments, the next, she had been an old woman, waiting for death to gather her up. It had taken three excruciating weeks. She had let go at last on a rainy night in December. The family was gathered around her. Mamá had wept and kept telling her that she’d done a good job, that she’d made everything all right, and that she loved her, she loved her so very much. Papá had tried to soothe her, but she couldn’t be soothed. The uncles knelt at her bedside, stunned and speechless. Elena had promised to keep the family together, no matter what, to never let anything shatter them, then she had fallen into Franco’s arms. Little Berto had curled up in the curve of Mamá Imelda’s arm, and was there when the life slipped out of her. Victoria had picked him up and handed him to his father before she crossed Mamá Imelda’s arms over her poor chest. She had cried again then, holding her grandmother and wishing for her to wake up, to be as she had been, to be the woman Victoria had always wanted to be.  
  
But it hadn’t happened.  
  
The silent hacienda had mourned, had seen her to her rest, and finally, painfully, had started working again. Mamá Imelda had not let them shut down the workshop while she was dying, and she certainly would not have approved of keeping it closed for long once her final needs had been seen to.  
  
Mamá had been working hardest of all, as if every shoelace could bind Mamá Imelda’s spirit more tightly to the shop. She stayed up until all hours, filling orders and doubling the year’s tithe of charity shoes in one long, sleepless night. Victoria had found her this morning, finally sleeping in a fitful way, her head down on the work table, surrounded by a halo of leather scraps. When Victoria had woken her, she’d looked up with the expression of a small, frightened child and said, “Mamá? Where’s Mamá?” Then, she’d come fully awake and shaken it off and said, “I’m sorry, mija, I was dreaming.”  
  
“What was your dream?”  
  
“Oh. I was small. Papá was gone and then I couldn’t find Mamá. And now they’re both gone.” She took a shaky breath and sat up straight. “I’m being ridiculous. Work. Mamá always said we need to work. There’s no time for this nonsense. We’re strong. We’re…”  
  
“I’m going up to San Pedro today,” Victoria said, though she’d had no such plan until she spoke it aloud. “I’ve been away for a long time, and I have lessons to teach. Come with me, Mamá. Come breathe fresh air and see new things. I think you’ll actually like the village.”  
  
“I have to—”  
  
“Mamá, please. It’ll be good for both of us.”  
  
“But… don’t you usually go with that boy?”  
  
“He’s gone. And it was always my job. He barely put up with it. No one up there wants the revolution. They just want science and math and reading. We can take the shop truck. We’ll bring up some of the shoes. There are a lot of children who need good shoes.”  
  
And so they’d climbed into the truck, loading it with boxes of children’s shoes, and now they were trundling up the road, and Victoria was thinking about the radio, and Joaquin’s truck, and how she had chased him away with a chancla because a bad man was much worse than no man, and a bad man was someone who would hurt her heart the way he had while her grandmother was dying.  
  
“What do you usually listen to?” Mamá asked.  
  
“What?”  
  
Mamá pointed at the place where the radio would be in any other truck. “You were reaching—”  
  
“Oh. News. Weather.”  
  
“Of course.” She looked out the window. She was still pale, and there were dark circles under her eyes. Her trenzas were uneven, and she looked like she’d aged a decade since Mamá Imelda’s stroke. She was still young, in her fifties, and she wasn’t ill, but she looked exhausted. “I hear the music coming from cars now,” she said. “I don’t understand it. A lot of it is in English. What’s it about?”  
  
“I don’t know. I don’t listen. Well, I hear. It’s the same as music everywhere. Love songs, rebel songs, songs about how the singer wants things to be. Or…well. It’s not that we never hear it.”  
  
“We never did get around to banning open windows,” Mamá said dryly. “Though I saw your sister slam one yesterday, and she’s developing quite the death glare when she stares at the plaza.”  
  
“She promised to keep the family together. I’m sure she’ll calm down. But you know… she wants to prove…”  
  
“Yes. I know.” Mamá sighed. “So, there’s a song that goes, ‘na-na-na-nana-na-na.’ What does that mean in English?”  
  
“It means ‘na-na-na.’” Victoria smiled faintly. “I think you mean ‘Hey, Jude.’ It’s about accepting a new stepmother.”  
  
“Charming.” Mamá’s voice was far away. “I should have learned English. Mamá spoke a little. But I always thought she’d be there to take the foreign orders.”  
  
“I’m here, Mamá. I’ll take care of the English orders. And I’m learning a little Portuguese. Maybe we can ship to Brazil. If the chaos ever calms down.”  
  
“There’s always chaos. Your generation thinks it invented the stuff, but I promise, there’s always been chaos, and there always will be chaos, and, as Mamá always said, people will need shoes anyway, so we keep making them. Whatever the…” She stopped and took a gulping breath.  
  
Victoria chanced a glance over. “Mamá?”  
  
She held up her hand. “Keep going. I’ll be all right.” She pressed at her eyes. “Mamá really won’t say that anymore, will she?”  
  
“Are you sure you don’t want me to pull over?”  
  
“Where would you pull over? Into the rock wall, or over the canyon?”  
  
“That’s a good point.”  
  
“Keep going. Tell me what the na-na-na song is.”  
  
“It’s the Beatles. A British group. Very big. One of them got divorced, and another wrote the song for the first one’s son, to make him not fight with his new stepmother, I think.” Victoria drove another mile or so in silence. “I remember you dancing when I was little.”  
  
“I hurt myself. You and Elena got scared.”  
  
“It was a sprained ankle. I saw Tío Oscar hurt himself worse nailing on a heel, and no one gave up shoemaking.”  
  
“Mamá realized I had been lying about dancing. So I stopped.”  
  
“You could… let music back…”  
  
Mamá straightened up and raised her hand, but apparently thought better of a slap, given that Victoria was driving on mountain roads. She put her hands back in her lap, and said coldly, “Do you think I waited for this?”  
  
“Mamá…”  
  
“Do you think I was… like a vulture, waiting for my mother to die so I could win an argument? Cackling that now it would be my moment? I don’t want my moment.” She put her hand to her mouth suddenly and swallowed a sob. “I want my mother. I thought I’d outgrown that so long ago.”  
  
There was a small turnout half a mile down the road, and Victoria pulled into it and reached over, putting her arms around her mother. “It’s okay, Mamá. No one outgrows it. I want Mamá Imelda, too. And I’ll never not want _my_ mamá. It’s a symptom of having a good mamá.”  
  
Mamá nodded. She took a few deep breaths, getting herself under control, then she said, “I’m sorry, mija. I was fighting with her about it. Little Berto was tapping his feet to music through the window and I geared up to have the argument again, and while we were fighting… that’s when she fell… And I can’t… I can’t fight with her now. It would feel wrong, like… like I was just…” She waved a hand. “I just can’t.”  
  
“Fair enough.”  
  
“When I was small… after Papá left… I was so afraid I’d lose Mamá. I was afraid of becoming an orphan. I suppose it happens to everyone eventually, but it’s so much worse than I thought. I don’t even know who I am.”  
  
“You’re my mamá,” Victoria said, and kissed her cheek. “Socorro Rivera Rivera de Hernandez…”  
  
“You know Rivera isn’t even our name. Neither Mamá nor Papá knew their real names. Neither did Franco’s grandparents, for that matter, so Berto won’t know either. Who knows what our real name is?”  
  
“It’s our real name _now_. We’ve made it our name.” Victoria ignored—as she usually did—the fact that she and Papá were _actually_ not Riveras, the only ones left in the hacienda since Elena had married back into the name.  
  
Mamá sniffed and wiped a hand over her eyes. “I’m sorry again. I just feel like I’m looking over my shoulder, and I can’t see anything at all anymore. It’s… well, I suppose you’re old enough to not be too troubled by your mother admitting that it’s a little frightening.”  
  
“It’s all right. Are you ready for me to go?”  
  
Mamá nodded. “Let’s go. Onward to the clouds.”  
  
They didn’t talk much as they went up the mountain, passing through some low cloud cover as they made the final approach to San Pedro Ayahuitl. Victoria had started coming here while she was taking classes at Benito Juarez. There’d been a service group, and she’d offered to come and tutor up here. There’d been others who’d come and gone, mostly with an eye toward stirring up the poor village, and they’d mostly left disappointed. Now and then an individual might come or go, but the village itself was uninterested in the great tides of history. The Aztecs had overrun it, then the Spanish, then the revolutionaries, but all of them had left, and the village had gone on.  
  
The poverty had felt crushing to the city people Victoria had visited with, and they’d been baffled as to why a village that had only recently gotten electricity (which was still spotty) and where no one had bothered to build a school was not on the front lines of the student movement, but Victoria had always felt oddly at home here. She’d helped them put together a little school room in their church, and had gotten the elders to come in and teach history. She herself tried to bring in science experiments, and, though she’d forgotten them this morning in the miasma of grief at the hacienda, she usually brought books for everyone. They weren’t illiterate (and had been quite offended when one of Victoria’s early partners had treated them like they didn’t even know the alphabet); they had just learned writing from parent to child for a few generations, instead of depending on priests and schools. An older man named Ángel Lopez Campana had started to put together a library in the school room. He was charmed, for some reason, by the idea of cataloging, and had lovingly created a card for each one, and kept track of who had each book at any given time.  
  
She pulled the truck into the tiny area of flattened grass near the plaza where the few local vehicles tended to wind up. She hadn’t even killed the engine yet when a dozen local kids spotted them and ran over. The doors were opened, and a boy helped Mamá down. Another came around and peeked into the truck bed, where he spotted the shoe boxes.  
  
“Special treat,” Victoria said. “I have thirty pairs of shoes. A gift from my grandmother.” She shook her head, wondering what had made her say that. The charity shoes certainly had been Mamá Imelda’s initiative, but she was beyond gift-giving now. “Please make sure they go to the children who need them most, not the ones who get here first, then come back to the school. Isidro!” she nodded to the nine-year-old boy who’d just climbed up into the truck to start unloading.  
  
“What?”  
  
“You’ll make sure they go where they’re needed?”  
  
“Sure!”  
  
Victoria got out of the cab and looked at Isidro’s own shoes, which were falling apart and bound together with string. She sighed. “I know you’re not going to take a pair, so I’ll make you a special pair and bring it next week.”  
  
“You don’t have to,” he said, tossing boxes to the others. “You could teach me to fix them.”  
  
“There’s nothing left of those to fix,” Mamá said, inspecting his feet from the other side of the cab. “I’ll make more for everyone.”  
  
“Isidro, this is my mamá,” Victoria said.  
  
“Hola, Señora,” Isidro said, giving her a bow, then vaulting over the side of the truck to stand beside her. “You don’t need to make so many shoes!”  
  
“I’ll make shoes if I want to make shoes.”  
  
Isidro opened his mouth to argue, then got a glance from an old man who’d wandered over. He nodded. “I don’t argue with anyone’s mamá,” he said. “Thank you for the shoes.” He tossed a pair to a girl with a long ponytail. “Meche, you heard what Miss Victoria said. People who need them first.”  
  
The girl answered in Zapoteco. “You need them most, silly monkey. And I’m older than you, so don’t tell me what to do.”  
  
Isidro stuck out his tongue.  
  
“Your friend doesn’t speak Spanish?” Mamá asked him.  
  
“She’s my sister. And she does, but only if I poke her with sharp sticks.” He smiled broadly.  
  
Mamá looked taken aback, though she didn’t say anything.  
  
“Is your Papá Ángel at the school room?”  
  
“Where else?”  
  
“Will you ask him to ring the bell?”  
  
“Sure. What will you teach us today?”  
  
“Shoes,” Mamá said, not waiting for Victoria to chime in. “I will teach you to mend your shoes, like you asked.”  
  
“Great!” Isidro ran off.  
  
Mamá watched him, then raised an eyebrow and said, “Sharp sticks?”  
  
“He’s kidding,” Victoria said. “She was just needling him, so he’s pushing back. Just like Elena used to do when I called her a baby chupacabra.”  
  
Mamá gave a very familiar disapproving scowl, which did Victoria’s heart good. “You understand what she said?”  
  
“I’ve been coming up here for seven years, Mamá. It seemed polite to learn the local language.”  
  
“And you know those two children? What are they called?”  
  
“Isidro and Meche.”  
  
“No, their family names.”  
  
“Saavedra and Lopez. I don’t know their whole genealogy. Why?”  
  
Mamá thought about it, then shook her head. “Nothing. It doesn’t matter.”  
  
Victoria considered pressing the subject, but Mamá was already headed for the church. She followed. “So, you’re going to teach them to do shoe repair?”  
  
“Did you have a different plan? I thought you just wanted to get out of the hacienda this morning.”  
  
“I did. And no, no plan.”  
  
Ahead of them, the church door opened, and Isidro ran out, giving them a wave as the bell started ringing above them.  
  
Mamá caught the door before it closed and went inside. “We should see what they have here. If I’d thought of this earlier, I’d have brought things from the shop, but then, they wouldn’t have those things most of the time, anyway. Is there a spare pair of shoes in the truck, Toya? I can take it apart.”  
  
“I don’t think so.”  
  
“Well… I’ll take these apart, then,” Mamá said, kicking her shoes off. “I can go home barefoot. I—” She stopped speaking abruptly as the door to the church office opened and old Ángel came out.  
  
Well, he wasn’t that _old_. Maybe ten years older than Mamá, in his sixties. But he was a student’s grandfather, so Victoria thought of him as old, and…  
  
She frowned. “Mamá?”  
  
Mamá had gone completely still, not like she was startled by the intrusion, but like she had seen a ghost.  
  
Victoria looked at Ángel. He was a thin, lanky man with thick hair that was still mostly black. He had small dark eyes, and heavy eyebrows, and a large, beakish nose. There was nothing alarming about him.  
  
“I’m sorry,” Mamá said. “You surprised me. I’m Coco Rivera. Victoria’s mother.”  
  
“Ángel Lopez.” He reached out and shook her hand. “You seem quite shocked.”  
  
“No. No, not shocked. I’ve never been to the village before. It’s lovely here. Has your family always been here?”  
  
“As long as the village has. Not many people leave San Pedro. I only know of a few youngsters, and my aunt. Who was a youngster, so that’s no different.” He looked around. “Can I get you something to start you out?”  
  
“I’ll need… well, let’s see what you have. Thread, needle, whatever seems to be…” She stopped, blinking rapidly. “I’m sorry. My mother taught me this. We lost her two weeks ago.”  
  
Ángel took her hand and led her to one of the church’s four pews. “I’m so sorry. You don’t need to step away from your grief to teach us such a thing…”  
  
“No, I do. I want to. Mamá would want it.” She looked at Ángel again. “Though she might have been surprised to see… the village. I don’t think she ever traveled into the mountains.”  
  
“Are you _sure_ you’re all right, Doña?”  
  
“I’m fine. And don’t call me ‘Doña.’ I’m younger than you are.”  
  
“Ah, but you are clearly a fine lady.” He bowed, with a little twinkle in his eyes… not a flirtatious one, just a playful one. “And I am at your service. I shall get all the ladies to bring their sewing things.”  
  
He left.  
  
“What was _that_ about?” Victoria asked.  
  
“Getting supplies.”  
  
“Don’t yank my chain, Mamá.”  
  
“Don’t be vulgar.” She nodded. “Fine. He looked like someone I knew once. But his eyes were all wrong. It was mostly the nose. Poor thing.”  
  
Victoria tried prodding, but within minutes, women started to arrive with sewing baskets, several of them taking seats for what promised to be a practical lesson.  
  
The children arrived only shortly after them, many sporting new shoes, prodded by their mothers to thank Victoria and Mamá, and the subject of Mamá’s odd behavior fell by the wayside. She spent an hour dissecting her own simple high heeled shoes, showing the townspeople how each part fit into each other part, and how—as long as they didn’t wait for total decay—they could rescue broken shoes without having to resort to new ones.  
  
The children were vaguely interested for a while, but it became clear that they wanted more of Victoria’s science lessons (she enjoyed making things blow up for them when she could), so she took them outside. There were no explosives, but there was a wilting lobelia that an elder allowed her to pull up, so they could examine the roots and look at the workings of the stem and the leaves.   
  
Isidro, as usual, picked up the lesson faster than the others, and by the time Victoria had finished with the rest, he was climbing along the low garden wall of the church, doing tricks and making a spectacle of himself. Mamá was standing just outside the door, barefoot, curling her toes into the cool grass and smiling to herself as she watched him.  
  
Victoria went over to her. “I’d love to have him come to town and go to school with the sisters. He’s a smart boy. He could learn more than I can teach him driving up once a week.”  
  
“Would he be allowed?”  
  
“He’d be allowed, but I can’t see his family being able to pay for boarding. Do you think we could… help? Maybe give him a room?”  
  
“We could. But why would they let us?” Mamá crossed her arms over her chest and sat on a low wall, picking her feet up off the ground and tucking them under her skirt to keep them warm. “Better to let him… win a scholarship, maybe?”  
  
“What scholarship?”  
  
“The Imelda Rivera scholarship, of course.”  
  
“Oh… of course.”  
  
“I mean it. I don’t think we could afford it for a new student every year, unless we find good investment opportunities. But maybe one child every six years, to come down and board at the school, all the way through until he finishes. I think Mamá would like that. She had to sew a hundred shirts a year to get herself and the uncles through school. I think she’d like helping.” She took her feet back out from under her skirt and pressed them down into the earth, curling her toes into it like she was using them to stay on the planet. “I’ll talk to your papá about it. He could set up a fund.”  
  
Victoria groaned. “Mamá, _I_ know how to set up a fund. You don’t need Papá’s say-so—”  
  
Mamá, to her surprise, laughed. “Toya, mija, do you really think your Mamá Imelda raised me to think such a thing? I learned to balance books before I learned to properly read them. But Julio has been handling the big finances for the business for years. Even Mamá thought he was best at it. It’s a talent he has. I wouldn’t deny it to him. But I’m sure he would be delighted to share it with you, if you’re deeply interested.”  
  
“Oh.”  
  
“Before I got married, Mamá always kept the books. Even before…” She shuddered. “Mamá always kept the books.”  
  
“Before your father left?”  
  
“I can’t, mija.”  
  
“Do you remember him?”  
  
“I do. But I… Mamá’s heart was broken. I could never… and I haven’t been…”  
  
“Waiting for her to be gone, I know.”  
  
“Mamá was a precious gift.” She clenched her jaw and gathered herself before another crying fit could come on. “Now, tell me about these children. Is the boy the best one for the scholarship? Shall we have some sort of qualification… an essay? What should we ask? Or will it just be ‘Victoria’s favorite’?” She grinned. It was weary and forced, but it was a grin.  
  
“Well, that would hardly be fair. And we’d have to make sure the parents were all right with boarding them. What do you think Mamá Imelda would want?”  
  
“A music scholarship, obviously.”  
  
Victoria laughed at this, harder than it deserved. “Of course. It will go to the best interpretive dance.”  
  
“With an original composition.”  
  
Victoria reached over and took Mamá’s hand. “We’ll talk to the family later, and decide how to do it. But I really think it will be Isidro. He’s smart as a whip. Not very ambitious, but smart as a whip.”  
  
“Mamá might have approved of the lack of ambition in a boy.”  
  
“Maybe,” Victoria ventured, “they’ve seen each other and talked.  Your parents, I mean. On the other side. Maybe Mamá Imelda’s heart isn’t broken anymore.”  
  
“I’m sure it’s not,” Mamá said, but didn’t elaborate. “Ángel invited us to supper at his house. I’d like to go, if you’re not in a rush to get back down the mountain.”  
  
“I’m not. I enjoy visiting with them.”  
  
“He warned me that there would be singing. And that he knows of a young girl with a beautiful alto voice who sometimes sings with them.”  
  
“I don’t know who he could mean.”  
  
“Of course not.”  
  
Before they could discuss the matter further, Meche Saavedra ran over with a pair of handwoven bedroom slippers to keep Mamá’s feet warm. “My bisabuela made these,” she said, in perfectly serviceable Spanish. “Papá Ángel says you may have them, as a thank you for showing us things today. If they fit.”  
  
Victoria would have protested—the people of San Pedro did not have a great deal to spare—but Mamá took the slippers, which had a lovely, colorful design in their fabric, and said, “Thank you very much, child. I shall put them on when I get inside. They aren’t made for walking on the road, and I wouldn’t want to spoil them.”  
  
Together, they followed Meche to her grandfather’s house, and they enjoyed a small, simple meal together. Mamá didn’t sing—and Victoria didn’t either, though she normally would have—but she did smile when Ángel took out his guitar and sang old Zapotec songs in his fine tenor voice.  
  
The sun had nearly set when they finally left, which meant that Victoria would need all of her concentration on the mountain roads, but she didn’t regret the delay. She turned the ignition, and the truck sputtered to life, the headlights washing over Isidro, who was sitting on the church wall again. He smirked, then did a handstand and walked a few paces upside down.  
  
Mamá smiled at him fondly.  
  
“How are you feeling, Mamá?” Victoria asked.  
  
“I’ll be all right, I think,” she said. “Come on. It’s time to go home.”


End file.
